


Chocolate Pudding

by ckret2



Category: Marvel (Comics), Spider-Man (Comicverse), Venom (Comics)
Genre: (do u tag the fic as gen if there's references to a canon ship...), Adoption, Creepy Fluff, Cute Ending, Cute Kids, Gen, Kid Fic, Mild Horror, Wildly Unrealistic And Illegal Adoption Because Venom Is Involved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22521007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Venom accidentally loses the symbiote’s newest spawn and turns NYC upside down trying to find it.Meanwhile, a four-year-old girl prods a pile of chocolate pudding.
Relationships: Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Comments: 22
Kudos: 236
Collections: SYMBRUARY





	Chocolate Pudding

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for Day 1 of [@symbruary](http://symbruary.tumblr.com/), prompt: “symbisona/symbiOC”. Due to the fact that I am not a four-year-old girl, this is an OC, not a sona. This fic is not yet proofed due to the fact that I wrote it on my phone in a five-hour haze of symbiote-loving hyperfocus.
> 
> You: “Hey, where does this fic fit into Venom’s comic continuity?” Me: * _makes a wiggly hand motion_ *

“ _That_ should hold Spider-Man for a little bit,” Venom said to themselves as they swung away from the collapsing parking garage. “If it doesn’t outright squash him like the bug he is! Ha! But no—fate has never been so kind as to smile upon us that way. This is but a short reprieve, during which we can—”

There was a sensation inside their brain like a sticker peeling off of its backing as symbiote and host’s consciousnesses separated. **_Uh-oh. Eddie._**

“Hm?” Eddie tilted his head, as though to better hear the voice in his head. “What’s wrong, my love?”

**_Think I dropped a baby._ **

“What?!” Venom nearly crashed into a skyscraper. They cracked a window and then clung to it as Eddie’s heart leaped into his throat. For them to drop a poor innocent baby, especially at these heights, because that accursed Spider-Man had been hounding them—When had they been holding a baby—?

 ** _Not human,_** the symbiote quickly clarified. **_One of mine. Ours._**

“Oh!” The panic drained out of Eddie; and then immediately returned. “We had a baby?! Where? When?”

**_Don’t know; wasn’t paying attention. Near Times Square?_ **

“We’ll have to hurry. Any kind of miscreant could pick it up there!” Venom kicked off the building, swinging back in the direction they’d come from.

###

Faye leaned over as far as she could with the teacher’s vice grip on her hand, stretching her chubby brown fingers toward what looked to her like a pile of iridescent chocolate pudding sitting in the street just next to the curb. She couldn’t quite reach it with how tightly the teacher was holding her hand.

The pudding reached back toward her.

The teacher’s attention was split between watching traffic for a safe point to herd her charges across the street and scanning the sky to make sure the super villain that had crashed the children’s home van wasn’t looping back with Spidey to terrorize the square again. She glanced down once to make sure Faye wasn’t about to fall off the curb, looked back at traffic, belatedly registered that she’d seen the fidgeting four-year-old reaching toward some nasty gutter gunk, and looked down again. “Faye! Don’t touch—”

But there was no gunk. Just Faye, standing straight up, looking around in a startled daze like someone had just dragged her out of a daydream by setting off a party popper in her face.

The teacher didn’t have time to worry about it—Faye was probably just stunned from the recent super fight—and the light had just changed. The teacher hustled her charges across the street.

Faye saw a woman passing the other way with bright neon green cornrows. She reached up and patted her own cloud of bouncy black hair, twisting around in her teacher’s grip to look back over her shoulder at the woman with the colorful hair, seeing how the braids zigzagged like lightning down the back of her head.

Little patches of bright green bloomed in Faye’s hair, thread-thin tendrils mixing in with her natural hair. They wrapped around her hair like ivy weaving through a trellis, then wove the strands together, starting from her hairline and moving back. By the time they reached the other side of the street, five wide black-and-green braids inexpertly meandered back and forth over her head and dangled down to her shoulders.

It took the teacher two blocks to notice.

###

“We’ve turned the whole city upside-down,” Venom lamented, sitting morosely atop an office building with their chin in a hand. “A whole week, and no sign of our youngest progeny! Where could it be? Hiding in the sewers, cold and alone with only rats and strays to meet its needs for sustenance and symbiosis?”

 ** _The dinosaur-people would know if so,_** the symbiote pointed out. **_They would say. Yes?_**

“That’s true,” Eddie said, relaxing slightly. “They know your scent, they’d know your child’s too. Still, we should let them know to be on the lookout for one and to let us know if they find it.” He tried to remember the nearest sewer entrance that wouldn’t require them to pry up a manhole cover in the middle of a city street, and shot out a tendril to a taller building to swing them in that direction. “I just hope someone far fouler hasn’t seized our innocent offspring,” he said. “A criminal, a corporation, or, worse—an agent of the government.”

###

The children’s home’s top social worker—certified agent of the government—watched through a partially cracked window as the four-to-six-year-olds played outside. She held her phone to her ear with her shoulder, listening to the hold music.

Faye tripped while running around between the faded playground equipment. The social worker saw her push herself up, rub her cheek vigorously, and inspect her scratched up bloody knee. Faye scrubbed the dirt off the scratch, and when she pulled her hand away the scratch was gone.

The social worker let out a low whistle.

The hold music stopped and the social worker sat up straighter. “Hi! Yes, this is… oh, _hi,_ I think I spoke to you a couple of days ago.” She laughed politely. “Yes, this is about the—Yes. Faye Fletcher. I was wondering about the uh, the procedures to enroll a child at Xavier’s Institute if the child doesn’t have legal guardians? I understand sometimes legal parents give up guardianship of their children to your institute, I don’t know if the procedure is different if she’s already a ward of the state—” The social worker fell silent a moment. “Four years old.” She listened, then nodded. “Uh-huh. I see. See, our concern is—we don’t have anyone on staff trained to help with, uh, gifted children, and since our grant doesn’t allow us to hand gifted children to potential foster homes or adoptive parents unless they’ve passed a certification course—uh-huh. Oh, no no, I think it’s great to make sure the parents are prepared, but it's—yes. It’s going to make it harder to place her.”

She listened a moment, watching the children outside play—a couple of the kids were pretending to be dogs, running around on all four and chasing after sticks other kids threw. The teacher on duty rushed over to stop them from putting the sticks in their mouths. Faye chucked a couple of sticks, but by this point there were more stick-throwers than pretend dogs to chase them, and hers were ignored.

“Oh, uh…” She checked her legal pad. “Nothing dangerous, so far. Shapeshifting. She keeps dying her hair, braiding and unbraiding it, and changing her clothes. I—yeah, the clothes shape-shift. They look like real clothing until they start shifting. And I _just_ saw her patch up a wound, so self-healing. Mhm—no, while I was on the line with you, just in the last couple of minutes. I’m watching the kids play outside. Did you see the video attachment on my email? Of her braiding and unbraiding her hair?” She nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, kind of like Medusa. That’s what I was thinking.”

She listened to another question. “No, the children aren’t afraid of her—I think they’re jealous of how she can ‘play dress-up,’ they call it. They—Oh! I should mention, she picked up an imaginary friend around the same time her powers developed. She calls it Chocolate Pudding. Some of the other kids say they’ve seen Chocolate Pudding, they think it’s a ghost. _That_ scared them.”

The menagerie outside was expanding beyond dogs. One girl had started running around flapping her arms, cawing like an eagle; the teacher on duty had her hands full trying to keep the girl from climbing on the play equipment and jumping off. One boy yelled “I’m a dinosaur!” and started stomping across the playground with exaggeratedly large steps; a couple more joined in.

The social worker shrugged. “I don't—Chocolate Pudding could be anything, as far as we can tell. None of the staff has seen any such beast. We don’t know if it’s some sort of… of shared psychic hallucination? Or a shape-shifting trick she hasn’t shown us yet, or just the kids being imaginative, or…” She trailed off. “Mhm. We don’t know what to make of it.”

Another kid yelled “I’m a dragon!” and charged at the first dinosaur, hissing loudly. Another cried, “We’re a unicorn!”

“If she’s not a fit for the Institute yet, then are you connected with any children's homes in the NYC area qualified to deal with gifted children? We don’t want to foist her off on another home, but if she develops something that we don’t have the support system to—” The social worker dropped her phone.

Faye was covered head to toe in a bubblegum pink second skin with a long mane of curly rainbow hair stretching down her back. Her eyes had been replaced by some cross between oversized anime eyes, multifaceted insect eyes, and sparkly rainbow-refracting diamonds. From the center of her forehead protruded a six-inch wicked-looking pearlescent horn.

They playground anarchy screeched to a halt as every child stared at her.

Bouncing on the balls of her feet, Faye grinned at them with wicked-looking pearlescent teeth.

Without breaking her gaze from the window, the social worker groped on the floor for her phone. “I’ve, uh, got something else you’ll want to know.”

The other children started screaming.

###

Peter Parker was awoken in the dead of night by a set of glowing white eyes. “What in the—!”

“Don’t scream. We’re not here to f—” Venom blocked Peter’s foot. “We _said_ we’re not here to fight!”

“You’re in my apartment!”

“You say that like we haven’t been here before!”

“Yeah—usually to fight!”

They considered that, and shrugged. “Not this time. We’re here—against our better judgment—to begrudgingly ask you to help us protect an innocent.”

“At—” Peter looked for his clock, realized he’d knocked it off his bedside table in his flailing, and finished, “at whatever-it-is in the morning?!”

Venom shrugged again. “We couldn’t sleep.”

“ _You_ couldn’t sleep, oy…” Peter rubbed his face. “Okay. Okay, just—is this going to require me to get out of bed?”

“No. Just to be vigilant.”

“Yeah, yeah, all right. Vigilant’s my middle name. Ol’ Spider-Vigilant-Man.” He rubbed his eyes. “What is it?”

Venom’s face peeled back, exposing Eddie’s shadowed face. “We lost a child.”

“Oh.” Peter spent a couple of seconds trying to muster up as much basic human empathy as he could after being dragged out of an extremely peaceful sleep. “I’m, uh… I’m so sorry. Was it—sorry, I’m trying to figure out how this works—was it a miscarriage, or…?”

“No! I mean we _lost_ it. We dropped it somewhere around Times Square a month ago.” With great indignation, he added, “While defending ourselves from _you._ ”

“Defending, _you’re_ the one who—” He flopped back and rubbed his eyes again. “Ugh. Okay. So are we—are we talking about another _Carnage_ here? Please say no.”

“That depends on the human with whom it’s bonded. Assuming it found a human at all.”

“Well—wow—in _Times Square?_ It could’ve landed in a tourist group and be in _China_ by now.”

“That’s why we need your help!” Eddie said, jabbing a finger uncomfortably close to Peter’s chest. “You move in circles we don’t. The Fantastic Four, the Avengers—we can search for our child in New York’s underbelly, but your web reaches much higher. We need you to be on the lookout for it. And if you find it, find _us._ We are qualified to deal with it—whether it can still be raised as a hero, or is already corrupt and needs to be put down.”

“Rrright.” Peter pushed Eddie’s hand away. The symbiote stretched over Eddie’s knuckles briefly clung to the ridges of Peter’s fingerprints. Yuck. “You sure you don’t just want me to—y'know—turn a flamethrower on it and let you know when the problem’s solved?”

“ _No!_ ” And Eddie was gone, hidden again behind a mass of snarling fangs. “We don’t know yet that it’s another Carnage! We will judge it. If there’s _any_ innocence left in it, we want to—to try to save it.”

At another time, Peter might have argued against the wisdom of “saving” a parasite for any reason—but it was half past can’t-see-his-clock a.m. and he was tired. “Okay,” he said. “All right, you got it. If I find a bundle of bouncing baby bile, I'll—uh—track you down, I guess—”

“Leave us a message,” Venom insisted. “At the bell tower. Where you were divorced and _we_ were wed. We’ll check there nightly.”

 _Divorced._ Peter let that word echo nightmarishly in his head a few times. “Got it. Bell tower.”

“We’ll be waiting.” With that, Venom climbed off Peter’s bed and vanished into the night.

They’d been gone for half a minute before Peter asked, “Did you break in through my window?”

###

The workers at the children’s home just didn’t know what to do with Faye.

They’d made what adjustments they could. They’d switched out the alarm clock for a radio alarm in her room when its shrill buzzing made her scream in pain and caused strange neon colors to ripple across her skin, and later they hurried her outside under a jacket when an older kid pulled a fire alarm to the same effect. The door buzzer from the entrance that prospective parents used—which played through speakers along the whole length of the main hall and was audible from nearly the whole building—had the same effect, but they didn’t have the budget to replace it with a different bell. They’d had to turn off the buzzer completely and tape a note to the door telling visitors that the buzzer was broken and asking them to knock, with a number underneath to text if nobody heard the knock. They were doing the best they could to help Faye.

But they didn’t know how to handle _biting._ Bad enough when the normal kids did it—normal kids didn’t have inch long daggers in their mouths.

“Faye, sweetie,” her teacher said gently, “you hurt Martin very badly. You know that, don’t you?”

Arms crossed tightly, staring at her lap, kicking her feet, Fay nodded sullenly. She’d hidden her face behind a layer of tie-dye rainbow skin without a mouth, which she’d taken to doing (colors subject to change) when she didn’t want to talk.

“I’m not mad,” said the teacher, who was more terrified than anything, “but I need to to understand why.”

“We’re hungry.” Her voice was muffled behind the mask.

That was the worst possible answer. “Faye, you can't—you can’t _eat_ your friends.”

“Yes we can.”

“You _shouldn’t,_ ” the teacher said quickly. “I saw you pushing your lunch around instead of eating it today. Wouldn’t you be less hungry if you ate your lunch? Then you won’t want to hurt your friends?”

“It was mac and cheese! We don’t want mac and cheese!” She kicked her feet more agitatedly.

In danger of getting kicked in the knees, the teacher scooted slightly back. “What do you want for lunch?”

Faye slammed her hands down on the edge of her seat and her mouth peeled open like a zipper, revealing three rows of fangs, and roared, “Chocolate Pudding wants _chocolate!_ ”

The teacher stared at her, mouth open. Already knowing this was a fight she was going to lose, she said, “Faye, honey, a growing girl can’t live on dessert—”

She started wailing.

###

“Are you good with kids, Peter?” J. Jonah Jameson asked.

“Oh, yeah, kids think I’m pretty cool,” said Peter, thinking of all the little Spider-Mans he’d seen wandering around last Halloween.

“Great. Got a human interest story we need a couple of pictures for,” Jameson said. He passed over a piece of paper with an address and several names. “Underfunded orphanage stuck with a mutant girl.”

“’ _Stuck_ with’? Hey, now—”

“Not like that. Their funding isn’t good enough to let them add a specialist to their staff, and the only two places in the state that are qualified to take mutant kids are overcrowded. I’m hoping if we whip up some public furor over this poor kid we can get 'em some donations—maybe shame legislature into increasing funding all around.” He pointed at Peter. “So I want you to make Miss Fletcher look cute as hell, got it?”

“Yessir.” Relieved Jameson wasn’t asking him to vilify an orphaned child, Peter looked over the address.

“And see if you can get her to uh… 'play dress-up’ for the camera.” Jameson waved a hand vaguely. “They said it’s some sort of shapeshifting? We won’t use 'em if they’re weird enough to rile up the anti-mutant crowd, but if it’s cute maybe it’ll tug a few heartstrings and film’s cheap. Just get some normal shots as well.”

“Will do!” Peter headed out the door, plotting his subway route to the children’s home.

An hour later, Peter was standing alone in the children’s home playground, wondering if he should leave a tip with the FBI for the Anti-Symbiote Task Force… or leave a note for Eddie Brock.

Which one did he trust to treat a preschooler better?

###

The teachers were practically crawling up the walls.

Faye was literally crawling up the walls.

And camouflaging with the wallpaper.

And tipping over bunk beds.

And kicking through wood doors.

And tearing up furniture with her unicorn horn.

Most incidents were the result of normal four-year-old rambunctious play, or the expected tantrums that came from being tired, hungry, or overwhelmed. But normal play and tantrums attached to super strength and a fluctuating array of sharp spikes were disasters waiting to happen. It was a miracle they hadn’t had any more incidents as bad as Martin’s hospital stay.

Half of Faye’s diet was chocolate bars now. They didn’t know if that was making things better or worse.

The last thing the head social worker needed was to open the door to her office and be greeted by the sight of Venom—whose muscles looked even bigger in person—sitting in one of the chairs usually reserved for prospective parents, one foot hooked over the other knee, grinning like the world’s happiest shark. “Hello,” he said.

The head social worker gaped. Venom stared expectantly at her. She whispered, “Hi.”

“My other and I are looking to adopt,” Venom said cheerfully. “Or, more precisely, to reclaim custody. We have reason to believe one of our children was mistakenly put up for adoption. A terrible error—we’ve been searching frantically for our darling child for weeks!”

The social worker mentally ran over the various manifestations of Faye’s “mutation,” working back to the day she’s come home with green hair—and her teacher had shakily recounted the close encounter between their van and a super fight. “Oh.”

Venom’s smile twitched wider. “I see you know who it is! Is it our family resemblance?” His teeth gleamed hideously white as he gestured toward her seat behind her desk, as though commanding her to be seated so they could begin negotiations.

She didn’t budge. “Please,” she said, “don’t hurt anyone here. All we have here are children, and they’ve already been through so much—”

“Madam, we would never!” Venom placed a hand on his chest, over the head of his white spider symbol. “We are a protector of the innocent! And who could be more innocent than poor, sweet children longing for a family, and the kind-hearted staff that care for them?” He paused. “But we’re not leaving without our child.” He gestured again toward her chair.

This time, she thought maybe she should take it.

As she sat, Venom asked, “What have you been calling our child?”

“Her name is Faye Fletcher.”

For a moment, this answer seemed to puzzle Venom; but then he said, as though talking to himself, “Ah, yes; quite right. She must mean…” He leaned forward slightly, fixing the social worker with what she could tell even with Venom’s blank white eyes must have been a piercing stare. “And what has Faye been calling her _other_?”

###

It was the fastest and most wildly illegal adoption in the history of the NYC Administration for Children’s Services. The terrified social worker informed Venom of the thirty hour parenting class most parents were required to take _before_ adopting a child, as well as the five hour supplement for parents taking in mutants—although at this point she no longer had any idea whether that information would be at all helpful for Faye—and Venom reassured her so sincerely that he would attend the first class he could find that she actually believed him.

Even if he didn’t go, she was sure he’d have a better idea of how to care for Faye than any of them did. And that instinct was only reinforced when he suddenly lifted his head and turned toward the door as though he’d picked up a familiar scent a full fifteen seconds before Faye came barreling into the office.

With reflexes so fast he almost looked like a blur, he dropped to one knee and spread his arms just in time to catch Faye in a great bear hug, the both of them wearing identical fangy grins. “We knew you’d still be an innocent,” he said, holding her out by the shoulders to take a good look at her, taking her in from horn tip down to pink feet. “Unicorns are always innocent. Isn’t that what you are, a sweet little unicorn?”

Faye giggled, sounding like a girl her age should for the first time in days.

When they left, Venom carrying Faye Fletcher Brock (and Chocolate Pudding) in his arms, he’d grown a gleaming white unicorn horn to match hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/190598949122/chocolate-pudding). Comments/reblogs there are highly appreciated (as are comments here)!


End file.
